MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

frabjous · 09-09-2009, 02:07 PM

Well, let me say too that I certainly hope readers will continue to support PDF for a long time to come... if for no other reason than that there are so many around now that even if a better alternative comes along, I'll want my current stash of PDFs not to become useless. If anything I wrote suggested otherwise, I'll happily take it back. (And with my Hebrew letter problem, as you know, of course, I do distribute things in PDF and there things are fine -- I just wanted to do a .mobi version too since Kindle has such a share of the market, and at least the first two generations don't support PDF. )

I think we may have different estimates of how much work it would take to change existing technologies to deliver high-quality typesetting that could be automatically reflowed (and you're of course right that LaTeX was designed with a different purpose in mind and would have to be changed, updated or augmented in various ways) vs. how much work it would save and what the other benefits would be. But there's little point in trying to quantify such things; too much is unknown until it is seriously attempted.

I'll admit that part of the desire to create such technology is selfish. For one, I could use it for my own writing. I like what I write, even pre-publication, to look good. This is why I write in LaTeX, and distribute to colleagues for comments in PDF, whereas most others in my field write and distribute in Word, and wait until publication to get nice looking documents. Most of the reading I do is pre-publication stuff: whether it's student papers, work by colleagues who want feedback, or I'm refereeing a submission to a press pre-publication. If would be nice if I could take the files they sent me, do at most one universal conversion without deciding in advance on a fixed layout and font size, put them on my reader, and get decent looking results without deciding on a fixed format in advance.

I'll certainly settle in the meantime for TeX-advocacy, hoping to be sent the source to create my own appropriately sized PDFs.

09-09-2009, 02:07 PM	#569
frabjous Wizard Posts: 1,213 Karma: 12890 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Device: Sony PRS-505	Well, let me say too that I certainly hope readers will continue to support PDF for a long time to come... if for no other reason than that there are so many around now that even if a better alternative comes along, I'll want my current stash of PDFs not to become useless. If anything I wrote suggested otherwise, I'll happily take it back. (And with my Hebrew letter problem, as you know, of course, I do distribute things in PDF and there things are fine -- I just wanted to do a .mobi version too since Kindle has such a share of the market, and at least the first two generations don't support PDF. ) I think we may have different estimates of how much work it would take to change existing technologies to deliver high-quality typesetting that could be automatically reflowed (and you're of course right that LaTeX was designed with a different purpose in mind and would have to be changed, updated or augmented in various ways) vs. how much work it would save and what the other benefits would be. But there's little point in trying to quantify such things; too much is unknown until it is seriously attempted. I'll admit that part of the desire to create such technology is selfish. For one, I could use it for my own writing. I like what I write, even pre-publication, to look good. This is why I write in LaTeX, and distribute to colleagues for comments in PDF, whereas most others in my field write and distribute in Word, and wait until publication to get nice looking documents. Most of the reading I do is pre-publication stuff: whether it's student papers, work by colleagues who want feedback, or I'm refereeing a submission to a press pre-publication. If would be nice if I could take the files they sent me, do at most one universal conversion without deciding in advance on a fixed layout and font size, put them on my reader, and get decent looking results without deciding on a fixed format in advance. I'll certainly settle in the meantime for TeX-advocacy, hoping to be sent the source to create my own appropriately sized PDFs. Last edited by frabjous; 09-09-2009 at 02:11 PM.